Coyne: Alberta crisis shows again why we need to reform our political parties

If experience is any guide, Alberta Premier Alison Redford and her party will now endure a long, ugly, debilitating spectacle of anonymous sniping against the leader, writes Andrew Coyne.

Photograph by: Jason Franson/THE CANADIAN PRESS/File
, Postmedia News

The details of Alison Redford’s disgrace need not detain us: the $45,000 spent to fly to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, the trips on government jets for her daughter and her daughter’s friends, or to fly to party fundraisers.

The Alberta premier is not in the trouble she is in because of her droit de seigneur approach to the public purse, nor even because of her tin-eared response, or responses, to the criticism it aroused. Certainly it is not because of her alleged proclivity to tantrums and bullying, as charged by a dissident caucus member: If that were all there wouldn’t be many leaders left anywhere.

If her caucus members are now disposed to mutiny — if she now fears, like some Third World presidente, to leave the capital — it is for one reason above all: because they are afraid she might cost them their seats. That’s unfair, of course: It isn’t only the premier’s personal style or her handling of the scandal that has brought them so low in the polls, but rather the way in which these seemed to confirm existing public concerns about her Progressive Conservative party generally: that, after 42 years in power, it had grown arrogant, entitled, even corrupt — the same concerns that nearly defeated it in the last election.

What’s noteworthy about this for our purposes is how little it took to turn the simmering caucus discontent into an outright crisis: one member. One member resigns from caucus to sit as an independent — he was already planning a run for the federal Conservatives in next year’s election — and suddenly her leadership is said to be fatally weakened, her survival in doubt, her days numbered.

Yes, but what is that number? Nobody knows. In fact, it’s anybody’s guess what happens next. Nobody knows where this goes, or how to proceed, or what she might do, or should. It’s all a black hole of speculation and uncertainty.

She might resign tomorrow, for all I know. But if experience is any guide, she and her party will now endure months of agony, a long, ugly, debilitating spectacle of anonymous sniping against the leader met by furious threats of reprisals, with no rules, no timetable and no means of settling the question other than sheer exhaustion. We’re already seeing some of this: There are said to be 14, or 18, or is it 25 members of caucus who are prepared to bolt, thus depriving the government of its majority.

That the number of those who have actually done so stands at one does not matter. It is a battle of shadows, and shadows of shadows: How many are against her? How many are for? How many does she need? How many is she expected to have? How much must she exceed expectations in order to exceed expectations of her excess? The premier, for her part, can be expected to dig in for a war of attrition, and why not? She still has plenty of weapons at her disposal, not the least of which is inertia: Everyone knows that, if she were to resign, the party would have to endure a long, ugly, debilitating leadership race to replace her. And this is the system we regard as “normal.”

On the other hand, let someone propose, as the federal MP Michael Chong has in his notorious Reform Act, that the system of leadership review be regularized and codified, with clear rules, a transparent process and a short timetable, and it is roundly denounced as destabilizing. One member may have been enough, under the status quo, to paralyze the government of Alberta, but it is the 15 per cent of caucus that Chong proposes should trigger a leadership vote that is often dismissed as “too low.”

Chong’s bill, you’ll recall, aims to “rebalance” the relationship between the party leader and caucus. By making explicit the process by which a caucus could remove a leader, by eliminating the leader’s veto over every candidate’s nomination, and by conferring on caucus, rather than the leader, the power to admit or expel a member, it would loosen the leader’s grip on ordinary caucus members, at the same time as it gave caucus greater power to hold the leader to account.

Less often stressed is that it would also stabilize that relationship. No one doubts that under the present system a caucus can, with sufficient nerve and singleness of purpose, remove a leader — eventually. But the process is so opaque, the endpoint so uncertain, that it is invoked only with much hesitation and great dread. A leader can abuse his position for years before finally running out of rope, with results that are often quite gruesome.

A leader, on the other hand, who was conscious at all times of how quickly and easily he could be dispatched — a matter of days — would be less likely to get so dangerously out of touch as Redford, or Gordon Campbell, or Jean Chretien. It would be better if the process for selecting a new leader were equally swift — a vote of the caucus, again, rather than of the party membership at large — but on this Chong elected to compromise.

He has signalled a willingness to compromise on other points. Perhaps, rather than 15 per cent, a 20-per-cent or 25-per-cent threshold might prove more acceptable. Perhaps the votes of a majority of the whole caucus, rather than just those present, should be required to eject the leader. Perhaps, rather than electing a nomination officer in each riding with the power to approve or reject a nominee, they might be elected provincewide — assuaging fears of rogue ridings or candidates, without entrusting such enormous power to the leader.

These are reasonable amendments. Just so nobody thinks the system we have now is reasonable.

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